The Argonauts, as the first-comers christened themselves, were ambitious for self-government, perhaps somewhat prematurely. On November 6, 1858, when there were not two hundred men within a radius of two hundred miles, a score or more met and solemnly organized the gold fields as Arapahoe County, Kansas Territory. Delegates were as solemnly elected to sit in the Territorial legislature and in the Congress at Washington. These Arapahoe County officials were recognized by Kansas, but the gold fields were so remote that pioneers were forced to organize their own local governing units, especially in the mining camps where personal clashes and violent disputes over claims were frequent. Thus the Peoples' and the Miners' Courts were born; the former usually adjudicated criminal cases, while the latter fixed the limits of mining districts and formulated mining codes. The first Miners' Court was formed at Gregory Gulch on May 9, 1859, and it soon evolved a highly workable code that was adopted by other mining districts. Plains towns such as Denver were governed by Peoples' Courts, which were notably orderly and fair. These improvisations were effective in handling local problems, but the need of uniform laws for the entire region made itself increasingly felt.

After a mass meeting in Auraria, April 11, 1859, a State constitution was drafted. It was rejected by popular vote in September, however, for a majority believed that Colorado was not yet ready for statehood and rightly suspected the motive of those promoting the agitation. Advocates of statehood then moved in a more popular direction. A delegate was elected to memoralize the Congress to establish a new territory in the mountain region, and a committee was appointed to draft the "Organic Act of the Jefferson Territory," under which the region was to be governed "until such time as the Congress of the United States shall provide a government for us." Without sanction of the Congress, an election was held late in October, and Robert W. Steele was chosen as governor of the provisional Territory, inaugurating a confused period when authority in the gold camps and the plains towns was shared by provisional officials, Arapahoe County officers, and the Peoples' and the Miners' Courts. The efforts of the delegate sent to Washington were not immediately successful, for the attention of the Congress was fully concentrated on the rising storm soon to break in the Civil War, but a bill to establish a territory within the boundaries of the present State was passed at length on February 28, 1861. The first official delegate to the Congress, Hiram P. Bennett of Denver, took his seat nine months later.

William Gilpin, who had played a prominent role in the conquest of New Mexico during the Mexican War, was appointed first Governor of Colorado Territory, so named at his suggestion because it was the source of the Colorado River. On his arrival in May 1861, Gilpin ordered the taking of a census, which revealed a population of 25,371 in the Territory - 20,798 white males, 4,484 white females, and 89 Negroes. Although this was not the true total, as many men were off prospecting in the mountains, it nevertheless indicated a sharp decline within a year, for the 1860 Federal Census had recorded a total of 34,277 persons - 32,654 white males, but merely 1,577 white females, together with 46 free Negroes. The differences between the two census totals are significant. Thousands of men had abandoned the gold fields, it appears, but those who remained evidently planned to settle permanently and had sent home for their wives and families, which undoubtedly accounts for the 300 per cent rise in "white females."

In July 1861 a supreme court was organized, and a delegate to the Congress was chosen. Elected in August, the first assembly convened in Denver the following month; one of its first acts was to create seventeen counties: Arapahoe, Boulder, Clear Creek, Costilla, Douglas, El Paso, Fremont, Gilpin, Guadalupe (renamed Conejos), Huerfano, Jefferson, Lake, Larimer, Park, Pueblo, Summit, and Weld. Bitter strife among several towns in their rivalry to become the Territorial capital harassed the legislators. The first legislature, sitting in Denver, selected Colorado City as the capital, but the second legislature was in session there only a few days in 1862 when it adjourned to Denver. That same year Golden was chosen as the capital when it offered the use of a frame building, with free firewood to heat it. The assembly met both in Golden and Denver up to 1867 when Denver was named the permanent seat of the Territory.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Colorado was quick to pledge loyalty to the Union, but when the call for troops came, almost as many left to enlist under the Confederate as the Union flag. Governor Gilpin, an ardent Unionist, quickly raised eleven companies on his own initiative, and in his zeal to equip them, issued $375,000 in drafts against the Federal Government without authorization. These drafts, at first repudiated by Washington, caused a financial panic in the region, which led to Gilpin's removal from office in 1862. But the troops thus organized performed valiant service in the West during the war, constituting part of the force that defeated a Confederate army under General Henry H. Sibley at La Glorieta Pass, New Mexico, averting the loss of the gold fields to the South.

Nearer home and of much greater moment to the settlers were the Indian wars that wrote a bloody chapter in Colorado's history. The outbreak of the Civil War necessitated the recall of many troops from the plains, and in 1862 signs of restlessness among the plains Indians multiplied. Early the next year they began to raid outlying ranches and small wagon trains. Conditions grew worse in 1864 when the overland trails were periodically closed. Governor John Evans, Gilpin's successor, summoned a council of the tribes to effect a settlement, but little came of the negotiations.

On November 29, 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington of the Third Colorado, eager to strike a paralyzing blow at the Arapaho and Cheyenne, led a large force to Sand Creek (see Tour 8a), where some seven hundred Indians were encamped under the protection of military authorities. Hundreds of Indian women and children were killed during the action, which aroused much protest throughout the country, and far from terrorizing the Indians, aroused them to fury. In 1865 the united plains tribes spread terror along the mountains. Overland communications were interrupted for weeks at a time; the Territory often suffered from want of supplies; ranches, farms, emigrant trains, and stagecoaches were captured, plundered, and burned. With the termination of the Civil War, troops were released for duty on the frontier, and by 1867 the Federal Government had succeeded in removing the Cheyenne and Arapaho to reservations in Oklahoma. The Cheyenne and their allies went on the war path once more in 1868 but were decisively defeated on the Arickaree River at the Battle of Beecher Island (see Tour 3). In 1869 the plains tribes in Colorado were finally subdued.

There were times during the 1860's when destructive forces seemed to be in league against the settlers. Within a year fire and flood threatened to obliterate Denver; the plant of the Rocky Mountain News, which had been erected on piles in the center of Cherry Creek so that it might be equally welcome in the bitterly jealous camps of Auraria and Denver City on opposite banks of the stream, was completely wrecked by a devastating flood that also swept away the city hall, drowning many prisoners in the jail. Clouds of grasshoppers descended upon farmers' fields and stripped them bare within a few hours. Placer mining declined alarmingly as the richer diggings were washed out; hard-rock mining was still awaiting a successful solution of the baffling problem of treating refractory gold and silver ores. Many mining companies had been dishonestly capitalized, and after the first excitement capital was difficult to obtain.

"I meet no manager of a mine here," wrote a visitor in 1865, "whether an old miner or an agent from the home capitalists, who does not condemn as foolish in itself, a fraud upon the public, and a damage to the whole mining interest, this practice of making the nominal capitals from two to ten times the actual, in the generally vain hope of gulling the flats in Wall Street or in New England country towns." Coloradoans were at times hard pressed to make a living; the 1870 census revealed a population of 39,864, an increase of merely 5,000 since 1860 and certainly a decrease from the population of the Territory during some of the intervening years.

But the tide of fortune now began to turn. A network of communications had been developed since the stringing of the first telegraph line into Denver in 1863; roads and bridges were built to link plains towns and mining camps. Although hopes of a transcontinental railroad were dashed when the Union Pacific was routed through the lower mountain passes in Wyoming to the north, resolute Coloradoans overcame their comparative isolation in 1870 by constructing the Denver Pacific Railroad to connect with it at Cheyenne. By 1872, General William J. Palmer had built his Denver & Rio Grande Railroad south to Pueblo and was soon laying track westward toward Canon City. These railroads and others worked a marvelous transformation in the young Territory.

Great cattle ranches spread out over the plains, many owned by English and Scottish investors. Enormous herds of Longhorns were driven north from Texas to be shipped from Colorado railheads, having grown fat from rich pastures of buffalo grass along the way. These colorful days of kingdom-like ranches and great annual round-ups were short, but the cowman has left his imprint upon Colorado. From the ranches came such terms as lariat, latigo, rodeo, corral, chaps, bronco, and mustang, largely of Spanish derivation, and such expressions as "gone West" or "Crossed the Great Divide." Only the cowman could have christened towns with such names as Loco, Wildhorse, Cowdrey, Mustang, and Horsefly; it was he who named Cow Creek, Horsetail Creek, and Cripple Creek. He, too, was responsible for much horse lore, cow lore, and snake lore, some of which still persists. A "line-back" buckskin, it is said, is the toughest of all horses, and no rattlesnake—at least, none acquainted with the lore—ever crossed a hair lariat. The cowboy's mournful ballads are still sung, and his persisting influence is reflected throughout the State in scores of dude ranches, which perpetuate, in a nice way, the free and rollicking life of the range.

Farming began to flourish at the same time. Thousands followed the railroads and laid out fields along the tracks. Cooperative agricultural enterprises were established, notably the Union Colony founded at Greeley in 1870 under the leadership of Nathan Meeker, agricultural editor of Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. The community constructed the first large irrigation project in Colorado and soon had its own Tribune; using the newly perfected electrotyping process, its name was printed in the handwriting of Greeley, whose script Abraham Lincoln had repeatedly complained he simply could not read. Colorado Spring's first newspaper, Out West, now the Gazette, began publication in 1872; the Longmont Sentinel and the Trinidad Enterprise had been established a year earlier. Pueblo read the Colorado Chieftain, founded in 1868, being the only newspaper between Denver and Santa Fe at the time.

Nathaniel P. Hill, metallurgist of Brown University, erected Colorado's first successful smelter at Blackhawk in 1868 and laid the foundation of a large personal fortune. Processes for treating refractory gold and silver ores were further perfected during the 1870's, which stimulated a revival of mining. Rich gold and silver strikes were made in the remote San Juan country in southwestern Colorado, a wild section assigned to the Ute by treaty in 1868. The Indians were now dispossessed, and in 1873 the region was thrown open to settlement. Within a few months the towns of Del Norte, Silverton, Ouray, and Telluride were booming on sites recently occupied by Ute tepees.

In 1874, Colorado College was founded at Colorado Springs by local Congregationalists, ten years after the Methodists of the State had established Colorado Seminary, now the University of Denver. A start had been made toward an adequate system of free public education, but school superintendents had a disconcerting way of leasing or selling school lands and pocketing the proceeds. As population rapidly increased, stimulated by the advent of the railroads, the legislature created the office of Superintendent of Public School Instruction, with a salary of $1,000 annually. The Territory soon had 60 school districts, 120 schools, and 80 schoolhouses, the largest of which was in Central City. Denver had three schools, but the first public school building was not completed until 1873, when 1,590 pupils were enrolled, four being "children of artists." Boulder graduated the first high school class in the State in 1876, and the East Denver High School graduated a class of seven the next year.

Colorado was rapidly coming of age and becoming more and more insistent on being admitted to statehood.